Just got home from Chicago at 2. 30 this morning, after a solid week of unpareleledⒶemendation dissipation. I was up all night Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, & was in bed only four & five hours a day during three of those days—the first (Monday,) I was up at 6 A M & did not go to bed till 7 the next morning. Still, I have not at any time felt tired, and hardly even drowsy. But of course the fatigue is in me somewhere, & will begin to come to the surface now.

I wish you had gone out there.—you would have been glad all your life. I doubt if America has ever seen anything quite equal to it; I am well satisfied I shall not live to see its equal again. How pale those speeches are in print—but how radiant, how full of color, how blinding they were in the delivery! Bob Ingersoll’s speech was sadly crippled by the proof-readers, but its music will sing through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my ears. And I shall always see him as he stood that night on a dinner table, under the flash of lights & banners, in the midst of seven hundred frantic shouters, the most beautiful human creature that ever lived. “They fought that a mother might own her child”—the words look like any other in print, but Lord bless me, he borrowed the very accent of the angel of Mercy to say them in, & you should have seen that vast house rise to its feet, & & you should have heard the hurricane that followed. That’s the only test!—people may shout, clap their hands, stamp, wave their napkins, but none but the master can make them get up on their feet.

I heard four speeches which carried away all my wits & made me drunk with enthusiasm. When I look at them in print they don’t seem the same—their still sentences seem rather the prone dead forms of a host whom I had lately seen moving to the assault in the fire & smoke & tumult of battle, with flags flying & drums beating & the clarion voice of command ringing out above the thunder of the guns. Lord, there’s nothing like the human organ to make words liveⒶemendation& throb, & lift the hearer to the full altitudes of their meaning.

But—what I set out to say was, I can’t talk before those ladies because I’m not going to have the time. If I had the time, & could talk about the hur wonders I saw in Chicago, & those ladies cared for anything so uninstructive, I’d do that; but I couldn’t, for I choke up with the mere memory of it—to talk of it would simply be impossible. Imagine what it was like, to see a bullet-str shredded old battle-flag reverently unfolded to the gaze of a thousand middle-aged soldiers most of whom hadn’t seen it since they saw it advancing over victorious fields when they were in their prime. And imagine what it was like when Grant, their first commander, stepped into view while they were still going mad over the flag—& then right in the midst of it all, somebody struck up “When we were Marching through Georgia.” Well, you should have heard the thousand voices lift that chorus & seen the tears stream down. If I live a hundred years I shan’t ever forget these things—nor be able to talk about them. I shan’t ever forget that I saw Phil Sheridan, with martial cloak & plumed chapeau, riding his big black horse in the midst of his own cannon—by all odds the superbest figure of a soldier I ever looked upon.

Grand times., my boy, grand times. Gen. Grant sat at the banquet like a statue of iron & listened without the faintest suggestion of emotion to fourteen speeches which tore other people all to shreds, but when I lit in with the fifteenth & last, his time was come! I shook him up like dynamite & he sat there fifteen minutes & laughed & cried like the mortalest of mortals. But bless you I had measured this unconquerable conqueror, & went at my work with the confidence of conviction, for I knew I could lick him. He told me he had shaken hands with 15,000 people that day & come out of it without an ache or pain, but that my truths had racked all the bones of his body apart. General Sherman said—well, no matter what he said, but it was mighty hearty & flattering, & most admirably worded—for he knows how to handle English.

But this postscript is extending itself too much. Its object is—now that I seem to have got down to it—to wail over the fact that my proof-sheets have begun to pile in on me at last, & that means, the dozen closing chapters of my book have got to be written now tackled now & stuck to without interruption till they are all written & completed—& this bars me out of the Holmes breakfast & my visit with you; & I just can’t bear to think of it. I’ve been imagining that visit, & the lovely talks in the lovely new house, & the delightful times we should have—& now it is all “up.” But you’ve got to extend the time, & allow me to come as soon as my confinement with this book is over & I’m able to be around again.